How the Books Became the Bible: the Evidence for Canon Formation

How the Books Became the Bible The Evidence for Canon Formation from Work-Combinations in Manuscripts* Michael Dormandy, University of Cambridge Abstract: This paper contributes to a developing conversation about the New Testa- ment canon. I consider the way manuscripts combine different works and investigate to what extent, even before canon lists became widespread, manuscripts combined only those works that were later affirmed as canonical. My method is to establish the works contained in all Greek New Testament manuscripts, dating from before the end of the fourth century. There are a number of cases where only a fragment survives, containing a small part of one work, but where there are also page numbers that enable us to esti- mate what else might have been present. My results demonstrate that the works that are now considered canonical were rarely combined with works now considered noncanon- ical. However, they also demonstrate that single-work manuscripts were widespread. 1. Introduction The origins of the New Testament canon continue to be a subject of controversy. In this paper, I aim to examine what light can be shed on this question by considering how literary works are combined in manuscripts. The scholarly debate on the canon is complex, but nevertheless it is possible to identify at least two types of view: the “open canon” and the “closed canon.” Two ideas characterize the open canon view, though not all scholars who hold one necessarily hold the other. Firstly, the open canon view, as represented by Jens Schröter and Geoffrey Mark Hahneman, holds that the canon did not become established until the fourth century. Although the corpora which * My thanks to Markus Bockmuehl and Daniela Colomo, under whose wise and helpful supervi- sion this paper began life; Mary Marshall, who asked challenging and helpful questions in the viva; Dirk Jongkind, who kindly gave time and input while supervising another project; Jeremiah Coogan and Katherine Dormandy, who commented helpfully on drafts; and to the anonymous reviewers at TC, whose suggestions greatly improved the article. Funding for the research which became this paper was generously provided by Rochester Diocese, the James William Squire Bur- sary, the Hall-Houghton Studentship in the Greek New Testament, and the Gosden Water-New- ton Scholarship. I am grateful for helpful discussion of this project at the Birmingham New Tes- tament Textual Criticism Colloquium, the British New Testament Conference, and the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, all in 2017. Funding to attend these conferences was generously provided by the Christ’s College and the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. 1 2 How the Books Became the Bible make up the modern New Testament, such as the four gospels and the letters of Paul, were stable earlier, it is only in the fourth century that a list of authoritative Christian writings resembling the modern New Testament was established.1 Secondly, open canon scholars, as represented by Schröter and Francis Watson, argue that we can discern no property in the canonical books that made it clear that they alone would be selected as canonical. When the gospels (canonical and not) were being written, there was no reason to think that only four of them would be later received as canonical, let alone which four.2 The closed canon view, represented most comprehensively by David Trobisch, is that the canon of the New Testament was fixed by the end of the second century. Trobisch specifically argues that all or most of our New Testament fragments originally came from copies of the “complete edition” of the New Testament, containing all twenty-seven books. He does not claim that all the books were bound in one physical codex, but he stresses that the works of the New Testament were from the earliest times produced as part of complete sets, just as a modern encyclopedia may exist in several volumes, which are always produced and sold as a set. He specifically claims that 01 and 03 were not exceptional manuscripts in their time, but represent the standard format for how the New Testament circulated.3 Harry Gamble, Graham Stanton, and Theo Heckel propose a more moderate version of this model: they argue that the gospels (Stanton and Heckel) or the Pauline corpus (Gamble) were not only fixed by the end of the second century (which even open canon scholars would accept), but also that the relevant works standardly circulated in those corpora and most of our gospel or Pauline fragments came originally from four-gospel codices or complete Pauline codices.4 In this paper, I assess the various different open and closed canon views in the light of work-combinations within manuscripts. I follow Matthew Driscoll’s distinctions between work, text, and artifact:5 Hamlet is a work. The New Swan Shakespeare Advanced Series edition ofHamlet by Ber- nard Lott, M.A. Ph.D., published by Longman in 1968, is, or presents, a text. My copy of Lott’s edition, bought from Blackwell’s in Oxford in 1979 and containing my copious annotations, is an artefact.6 1 Jens Schröter, From Jesus to the New Testament: Early Christian Theology and the Origin of the New Testament Canon, trans. Wayne Coppins, Baylor-Mohr Siebeck Studies in Early Christi- anity 1 (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013); Geoffrey Mark Hahneman, “The Muratorian Fragment and the Origins of the New Testament Canon,” in The Canon Debate, ed. Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2002), 405–15. 2 Schröter, From Jesus; Francis Watson, Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013). 3 David Trobisch, The First Edition of the New Testament(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For the specific point about 01 and 03 being representative of all early New Testament manuscripts, see 37–38. For the analogy with a modern encyclopedia, see 9–10. 4 Theo K. Heckel,Von Evangelium des Markus zum viergestaltigen Evangelium, WUNT 120 (Tübin- gen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999); Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Graham Stanton, “The Fourfold Gospel,” NTS 43 (1997): 317–46. 5 The OED records both spellings (artifact and artefact) as valid today and both are used in the literature. I use artifact throughout but do not change quotations where the other spelling is used (“artefact | artifact, n. and adj.” OED Online. December 2016. Oxford University Press. http:// www.oed.com/view/Entry/11133?redirectedFrom=artefact). 6 Matthew James Driscoll, “The Words on a Page: Thoughts on Philology Old and New,” inCreating the Medieval Saga: Versions, Variability, and Editorial Interpretations of Old Norse Saga Literature, ed. Judy Quinn and Emily Lethbridge (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2010), 85–102 (93). The Evidence for Canon Formation from Work-Combinations in Manuscripts 3 Manuscript can be used almost synonymously with artifact in this sense, though obviously many nondocumentary objects are considered artifacts. The termscanonical and New Testament are problematic, because they carry more histori- cal and theological weight than is helpful to my present purpose. This project does not discuss the rise of the word κανών to refer to a collection of authoritative works. It does not even chart the development of the concept of a bounded set of authoritative works. Rather, it concentrates specifically on the development of the bibliographic practice of combining particular works together. This raises an obvious question about the relationship between the concept and the practice: did the early Christians believe certain works were canonical because they were nor- mally part of the same bibliographic unit, or did they regularly include them in the same bibliographic unit because they considered them canonical? This question is also outside my present scope. In this paper I merely aim to present, more comprehensively than before and all in one place, the data on the bibliographic practice and to analyze and summarize that data. In order to make this clear, I use the term collection-evident, rather than canonical, to refer to a combination that contains only works that today are considered canonical. This is because such a combination may be evidence for the bibliographic practice of combining particular works, but not direct evidence for the theological concept of canon. This project is necessary for answering the questions I do not discuss regarding the rise of the concept of canon. To answer those questions, we must consider my research alongside explicit statements and discussions of the canon by early Christian writers. Edmon Gallagher and John Meade have recently collected a large number of such texts, and it is hoped that my research will compliment theirs. Gallagher and Meade’s findings reveal that the first complete and largely undisputed New Testament canon lists begin to appear in the fourth century. There are lists that may well be earlier, but that are uncertain in date or content. Origen’s most de- tailed list is from the third century, in his Homilies on Joshua, but is preserved only in Rufinus’s fourth century translation, and Rufinus may have edited the work to reflect the state of the canon in his own time. The Muratorian Canon is a text containing a list of canonical books, but the text preserved today is probably only a translation, the original of which has been dated anywhere from the second to the fourth century. In the fourth century, New Testament canon lists that closely resemble the modern canon are relatively common: in the East they include the lists of Eusebius, Athanasius, and Cyril of Jerusalem; in the West there are the list in Codex Claromontanus, the Cheltenham list, and the list in Jerome.7 My research could certainly be used alongside that of Gallagher and Meade to reconstruct how the canon developed, by comparing the bibliographic and literary evidence at different points in time.8 Charles Hill’s 2013 article is an example of this kind of project: he presents 7 Edmon L.

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